I Can’t Believe He Said This!

In light of the recent post about men losing their jobs, and the subsequent one that will appear on Monday, I was appalled at this quote from G. Gordon Liddy regarding the nomination of Sonja Sotomeyer to the Supreme Court.

LIDDY: Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

I could not believe this! Women have won Olympic gold medals while having their period.

There are times when the Neanderthals open their mouths and I want to scream, “What are you talking about? You have no clue.”

But now that I have calmed down, I have to consider the source. Here is what Mr. Liddy is most famous at: (courtesy of Wikipedia)

White House yearsIn 1971, after serving in several positions in the Nixon administration, Liddy was moved to Nixon’s 1972 campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President (officially known as “CRP” but to opponents known as CREEP), in order to extend the scope and reach of the White House “Plumbers” unit, which had been created in response to various damaging leaks of information to the press.

At CRP and at the behest of John Dean (operating on his own to impress his superior, John Erlichman, unbeknown to Liddy at that time), Liddy concocted several plots, some far-fetched, intended to embarrass the Democratic opposition. These included firebombing the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. in order to sneak into the building as firemen and grab sensitive classified documents leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, kidnapping anti-war protest organizers and transporting them to Mexico during the Republican National Convention (which at the time was planned for San Diego), and luring mid-level Democratic campaign officials to a house boat in Baltimore where they would be secretly photographed in compromising positions with call girls.

Most of Liddy’s ideas were rejected by Attorney General John N. Mitchell, but a few were given the go-ahead by Nixon Administration officials, including the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. At some point, Liddy was instructed to break into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel.

Watergate burglaries
Liddy was the Nixon Administration liaison and leader of the group of five men who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex with the intent to plant listening devices. John Dean had arranged for the operations of this group purportedly to curry favor with his White House superiors, H. R. Haldeman, and more directly, John Erlichman. Liddy did not participate in the break-in himself, insomuch as he did not actually enter the Watergate Complex, rather, he admitted to supervising the break-in from another hotel across the street.

For his crime, which he coordinated with Hunt, Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping. Liddy was sentenced to a 20-year prison term and was ordered to pay $40,000 in fines. He began serving the sentence on January 30, 1973. On April 12, 1977, President Jimmy Carter commuted Liddy’s sentence to eight years, “in the interest of equity and fairness based on a comparison of Mr. Liddy’s sentence with those of all others convicted in Watergate related prosecutions”, leaving the fine in effect. Carter’s commutation made Liddy eligible for parole as of July 9, 1977. Liddy was released on September 7, 1977 having served a total of four-and-a-half years of actual incarceration.

Rant over

Of course, this was a case of overzealous thugs who assumed they had the backing of the president. The only use they had for women was to use poor Rose Mary Woods as a scapegoat, the clumsy secretary who “erased” 18 1/2 minutes of taped conversations that could have implicated them further.